CDB Aviation Brand Guidelines: CDB Leasing’s Dublin Arm, Registered in 2016

A policy bank’s leasing company goes to Dublin.

CDB Aviation is the aircraft leasing business of China Development Bank Financial Leasing, known as CDB Leasing. Its operating company, CDB Aviation Lease Finance DAC, was registered in 2016 as a wholly owned Irish subsidiary of the Chinese parent, according to the milestones on the company’s website. The trade site Simple Flying described it in September 2024 as an Ireland-based aircraft lessor that is a subsidiary of the China Development Bank, and AeroTime described CDB Aviation Lease Finance in the same month as an Ireland-domiciled subsidiary.

The parent is a leasing company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which CDB Aviation describes as 41 years old and as the dedicated leasing arm of China Development Bank. The company says the bank is under the direct jurisdiction of China’s State Council and is one of the country’s three policy banks. AeroTime reported in 2024 that the group announced its latest Boeing order in a notification to the Hong Kong exchange.

The Dublin business was built quickly. In 2017 CDB Aviation appointed Peter Chang as president and chief executive, with a stated goal of expanding beyond China, and held a reception to mark its Dublin office, the company says. In October 2018 it opened a new Dublin headquarters on George’s Quay. Its website now names offices in Dublin, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and the Americas, and its footer gives two cities: Hong Kong and Dublin.

Orders, sale-and-leasebacks and freighters.

CDB Aviation’s business is the operating lease: it buys new aircraft from Airbus and Boeing, or buys jets from airlines and leases them back, and rents them to carriers. Its website describes a range of services from operating leases to fleet renewals and structured financings, and as of 30 June 2026 it gave its portfolio as 488 owned and committed aircraft and engines, leased to 83 airlines in 43 countries and regions.

The order book is the clearest documented part of the record. In September 2024, Simple Flying reported, CDB Aviation signed purchase agreements with Boeing on 18 September for 50 Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, for delivery between 2028 and 2031, a week after an order with Airbus for 80 A320neo family aircraft, for delivery from 2030 to 2032. AeroTime called the Boeing deal the largest 737 MAX order from China in nearly a decade. Earlier orders date from 2017, when the company says it agreed purchases with both manufacturers at and after that year’s Paris Air Show.

Sale-and-leaseback deals are the other half of the business. In January 2022 AeroTime reported that CDB Aviation had completed such an agreement with United Airlines, delivering 15 new Boeing aircraft — thirteen 737 MAX 8s and two 787-9 Dreamliners — between 2020 and 2021. The company’s fleet page lists the A320neo family and the 737 MAX 8 as its largest types, alongside A330, A330neo and A350 widebodies.

Freighters came later. The company says it took delivery in 2022 of its first A330-300 passenger-to-freighter conversion, converted by Elbe Flugzeugwerke in Germany and leased to the Mexican cargo carrier mas, after starting the conversion programme in 2020.

Other deliveries mark the spread of its customers. The company says its first Airbus A330neo, one of two for TAP Air Portugal, was handed over in Toulouse on 6 September 2019, and that in July 2019 it delivered an A320neo to Air Seychelles, which it describes as the first of the type operated in Africa. Its customer list runs from Aegean Airlines and Aeroméxico to Air Astana and Air China.

How lessors present themselves.

Aircraft lessors sell nothing to the travelling public. They buy commercial jets, lease them to airlines and sell them on, so their identities are built for airlines, lenders and investors rather than passengers. Their websites tend to open with a short line of figures — aircraft owned and managed, airline customers, countries — dated to the end of a reporting quarter, as Aircastle and Aviation Capital Group both do.

The aircraft themselves carry other companies’ colours. A lessor’s jet flies in its customer’s livery, so the photographs on lessors’ sites and in their press releases show airlines’ paint schemes rather than the lessor’s own. Aviation Capital Group announced in September 2026, for example, that it had delivered the first Boeing 737-8 in Trinity Airways’ new identity. Fleet pages list aircraft by type, and order-book pages count commitments from the manufacturers years ahead.

Customer pages are often walls of airline logos, sometimes grouped by region, and services pages explain the business in plain terms: operating leases, sale-and-leaseback deals in which a lessor buys an airline’s new aircraft and leases it back, trading in mid-life aircraft, and managing aircraft for other owners. Engines are a business of their own; trade reports describe lessors balancing engine use across their fleets, and some groups plan to expand into engine leasing.

Many of these companies are owned by banks, trading houses or investment firms, and their investor pages — results, fact sheets, credit ratings and bond reports — carry as much weight as the leasing pages. For the guides in this group we use navy, teal and silver tones with sans and serif stand-ins, an unofficial interpretation chosen for a finance-led sector; no company’s logo, livery or photograph is reproduced.

Ratings, leaders and awards.

Much of CDB Aviation’s public image rests on its parent’s standing. The company says it received investment-grade ratings from Moody’s, S&P Global and Fitch in 2019, and its website still sets out its credit ratings near the top of its “Who we are” page, next to its description of the parent bank.

Its leadership has changed twice since the Dublin office opened. The company says Patrick Hannigan, its former chief commercial officer, became chief executive in January 2020, and that the board chose Jie Chen as chief executive in 2023. In May 2025 it held a staff meeting in Shenzhen under the theme “One Company, One Team,” bringing together teams from its offices around the world.

CDB Aviation lists industry awards on its own site, and these are its own report of them: Chinese Lessor of the Year from Airfinance Journal for 2017 and 2018, Sustainability Aircraft Lessor of the Year from Airline Economics in 2024, and Deal of the Year awards from Finance Dublin in 2018 and 2026. It also says it has funded a scholarship with Airfinance Journal for a female student on the aviation finance master’s programme at University College Dublin.

For a design guide, CDB Aviation shows how a lessor with a state-bank parent can present itself through two cities, its ratings and a long order book. Compare BOC Aviation, another lessor owned by a Chinese bank, and ICBC Leasing. For this guide we use a deep blue, a lacquer red and a stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CDB Aviation’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.